PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

This chapter contrasts mechanisms and models of temporal co-ordination with models of representational alignment. We argue that alignment of linguistic representations needs a logistic component explaining the underlying co-ordinative processes between interlocutors in time, yielding a more profound understanding of how information exchange is managed. The processes and structures subject to this logistic component – or Interaction Phonology – must rely on the rhythmic-phonological structure of individual languages. In this way, interlocutors are able to guide their attention to relevant phonetic detail and to attune to the fine-grained organization underlying the linguistic structure encoded in the incoming speech signal. It is furthermore argued that dynamically entraining oscillators provide testable formal models of such a temporal co-ordination between interlocutors’ speech productions and perceptions.